> PS: "another" point of failure to cope with, for me, would be to lug a netbook AND > a phone AND depend on a cable or Bluetooth to connect the two.
Tsk. If you had an iPhone, you wouldn't tether, because that's simply Not Allowed. When you defile an iPhone by jailbreaking and tethering it, it makes Steve Jobs sad.
> The BigPharma are already trying (and succeeding) in getting patents for stuff that we ALL already possess, > and seek to make a profit from those patents.
Er, we all possess blood, and people give it up for free. Nevertheless, there are thousands of patents related to its collection, screening, processing, storage, and injection. "Big Pharma" isn't robbing the human race by "patenting stem cells", the companies are patenting the commercial processing of stem cells, and the equipment and chemicals used to do it. If your doctor wants to collect your stem cells and inject them elsewhere in your body, there's not a thing any IP lawyer can do to stop him... but they most certainly CAN do their best to prevent him from buying medical equipment (say, China) that infringes on one or more American patents.
Contrary to popular misconception, the FDA has NO role in the enforcement of IP law. If you seek approval for a drug protected by one or more patents, the FDA will go right ahead and process the application just like any other. If it's equivalent to a brand-name drug and you've documented everything properly, they'll approve it without so much as a grunt. The FDA doesn't HAVE to care about IP law, because they know that long before you sell your first tablet to a pharmacy, the patented drug's owners will have an injunction against you if they think there's the slightest chance their lawyers might be able to convince a judge (and possibly a jury) that your drug infringes against their patent.
> If you're stuck on a carrier with CDMA, you have to.
Correction: "If you're stuck with an AMERICAN carrier (who uses CDMA), you have to.
CDMA has a perfectly good feature called R-UIM, which is literally a superset of a GSM SIM card (you can use one in a GSM phone AS a SIM card, but you can't use a GSM SIM card as a R-UIM). The problem is that Sprint and Verizon are both assholes and refuse to let us have phones that use them. If you Google "+HTC +Apache +RUIM", you can read all about how the HTC Apache (sold as the PPC-6700 by Sprint and the xv6700 by Verizon) had the vestigial remains of a R-UIM card (missing only the bracket), and how users outside the US were able to buy American phones for a pittance, solder in their own R-UIM card sockets, and use them in India (I believe it also worked in New Zealand, South Korea, and possibly China).
The fact is, all four of America's major cell phone networks are assholes that go out of their way to MAKE their phones as mutually-incompatible as they possibly can. Obviously a CDMA phone isn't going to work with T-Mobile or AT&T, and a GSM/UMTS phone isn't going to work with Sprint or Verizon, but in America you can't even use a Verizon CDMA phone on Sprint, or an AT&T iPhone on T-Mobile -- locked, unlocked, or otherwise. Sprint won't let you use a CDMA phone whose ESN isn't already in their holy database. Verizon doesn't support R-UIM cards, and won't give out the provisioning info you'd need to make an arbitrary imported CDMA phone work properly with Verizon's voicemail or EV-DO data service (Sprint won't either, but their ESN-filtering means you won't even get far enough for it to matter anyway). AT&T and T-Mobile are technically GSM, but neither company will sell phones capable of UMTS on the other's network (unlocked or otherwise), and both go out of their way to make it as difficult and painful as possible to use their phones in a foreign country with SIM locks. Mark my words, when AT&T loses iPhone exclusivity, Apple is going to have two different GSM iPhones -- one that does 850/1900/2100 (so T-Mobile/US customers won't be able to use it), and one that does 1700/1900/2100 (so AT&T customers won't be able to use it).
Actually, that's not *quite* the whole story. What REALLY happened was the federal government pressured banks to make loans to "under-represented" groups who didn't meet normal lending criteria, then got Fannie Mae to insure those loans. The thing is, the banks eventually realized that the federal government's MOTIVE was encouraging loans to "under-represented" borrowers, but they weren't necessarily LIMITED to taking advantage of the relaxed underwriting criteria for members of those groups. They also learned how to package risky loans and sell them off quickly. Ultimately, they metaphorically said "Fuck it" and allowed ANYONE to qualify for a loan under those terms. Including (most importantly) people buying grossly overpriced investment properties.
The overwhelming majority of mortgage defaults (in Florida, at least) aren't from homeowners who over-extended themselves (even though there are quite a few)... they're from borrowers who bought overpriced condos expecting to flip them for twice the purchase price, then ended up having to actually close on them to avoid forfeiting their deposits (not realizing the worst was yet to come). The deal-killer ended up being the fact that most of those condos ended up costing more to own than they could conceivably earn from rental income. When the market completely tanked, to the point where those condos ended up losing more value than the down-payment itself, were a monthly drain of several hundred dollars (even WITH a tenant), and the investor-owner ended up finding himself or herself strapped for cash, THOSE were the mortgages that got walked away from en-masse. The default rate for owner-occupied homes is much, much lower because even if your house is totally "underwater" (worth less than the balance on the mortgage), one way or another you need somewhere to live... and if you weren't making mortgage payments, you'd probably be paying almost as much in rent. So, the incentive to walk away from the mortgage is much, much lower.
Plus, as a practical matter, unless some drastic external factor is involved (forced relocation, divorce, etc), most people won't default on their mortgage until they've already defaulted on all their unsecured debt. At least, if they have more than three functioning brain cells and understand the difference between secured and unsecured debt. As a practical matter, even people who grossly over-extended themselves buying a house can handle their payments once they declare bankruptcy, and no longer have to spend hundreds of dollars per month on credit card payments. Of course, any mortgage payments they make during the 6 months before bankruptcy get forcibly retracted by the court... but banks deal with this scenario all the time, and know that when it happens (especially in a property market like we have now), they're better off just re-aging the account and leaving well enough alone as long as the homeowner keeps the payments current going forward (because someone who was a risky borrower when they had lots of debt is actually a fairly low risk once all that debt gets washed away).
You know, reading this story completely made my morning a lot happier. In America, the idea that cats are treated horribly in China (if not eaten, as well) is almost a meme, despite the fact that cats are generally loved and treated quite well elsewhere in China's neighborhood (Taiwan, Japan, etc). Reading about Chinese public outrage over a cat's horrific death is absolutely heartwarming.
Fun fact: the Chinese character for 'cat' is written as the radical for 'animal' (literally, 'beast with claws') next to the phonetic for "sounds like mao1" (basically, "Meow" after you inflect it) -- http://www.ehow.com/video_4403804_write-cat-chinese-symbols.html
> Do you REALLY think that more than 1 in 100,000 "users" could accomplish the tasks listed above?
Well, ok, actually that's a bad example, because it's not really the way you'd do it on an Android phone anyway. If you were the developer, you'd have it tethered via USB and use adb (directly or indirectly) to shove the newly-built.apk file from your desktop PC to your phone. If you were a regular user, you'd either grab it for free from Android Market, or just download the.apk file with your phone's browser and install it from there (if Apple's stormtroopers were guarding Android Market with a team of attack lawyers). I took a few liberties describing the process so it would make more sense to people with a background in Java, but not Android.
The point is that Apple can stop big companies from selling technology deemed to be infringing, but all they can do is swat & take potshots at individuals selling apps that for a buck apiece in Android Market that do the same thing, and they can't do a thing to stop people from writing infringing programs and anonymously giving them away for free, because nobody can stop any Android user from exercising his or her holy right to install whatever he or she wants to install. The ultimate "nuclear option" that has traditionally kept companies 'honest' was the power of courts to deem millions of dollars worth of inventory unsaleable.
> Of course it's aimed at Google, Google will be the death of the iPhone.
I seriously doubt it, anymore than Apple or Linux have been the death of Windows. There's always going to be a market for an attractive, polished phone that "just works" and makes nontechnical users with lots of money happy. I personally see Android evolving towards two different market segments: dirt-cheap phones that are nice, but not as polished or powerful as Apple's best iPhone (for the unwashed masses), and high-end Android phones embraced by users who really want pocket-sized laptops... the same people who end up running regedit within 5 minutes of booting a newly-installed copy of Windows for the first time, or run Linux on their desktop PC. I'm convinced Microsoft is going to eventually buy Blackberry & migrate it to Windows Phone, or find a way to otherwise hijack and take over that market segment.
I don't see Apple's total market share ever really exceeding 10% or so, because their phones' most compelling features (besides "apple coolness") will inevitably end up running on Android phones (with or without anyone's blessing) as fast as they show up on Apple's own phones. By the same token, I think Microsoft's going to have a seriously uphill battle to win the hearts and wallets of anyone not shackled to an Enterprise Management Initiative(tm)... especially after yesterday's idiotic announcement that they're going to completely fuck and alienate one of their few remaining groups of loyal, hardcore supporters -- the people who paid lots of money for a Touch HD2, only to be slapped and told they can't have Windows Phone 7 because their phones have 5 hardkeys instead of Microsoft's mandated 3.
Well, even if Apple prevails, most of Apple's patents cover things implemented via software. If push came to shove, Android's API could be refined to simply omit them, with clear entry points where users (who could care less about infringement) can download their own thirdparty extensions to do the same thing and install them anyway. For example, Google could (in fact, should) implement keyguard as a Java interface, then at startup read a config file to instantiate an instance of an object that implements that interface to use as its handler. The handler provided by HTC might unlock the phone if the user slides open the keyboard, or presses & holds the 'send' hardkey while pressing and releasing the 'end' hardkey. If the user wants a graphical alternative that works like the iPhone (or Eclair on the Droid, or whatever), he simply copies the relevant jarfile to his phone, and edits the config file so that at startup, it instantiates a KeyguardFactory object from the jarfile, then uses it to create an IKeyguardHandler-implementing object that gets registered with the OS. Of course, there's no reason why the actual end user would have to interact directly with the jarfile, the config file, or anything else... THAT part could all be automated by the.apk & its manifest. The point is, if HTC and everyone else had to remove their keyguard apps from Android, you can bet that within a week, there would be several dozen free apps floating around that did it anyway.
At the end of the day, patent law only works as a real deterrent against people who need to sell tangible goods with an infringing component. If the infringing item costs nothing to make or distribute, Apple's lawyers could spend the rest of their lives playing whack-a-mole sending DMCA takedown notices to everyone and their brother who posts a copy of a keyguard app for Android somewhere, and it won't meaningfully stop anyone. Now, it WOULD give Apple a marketing advantage over Android, because then they could argue that an iPhone comes out of the box with keyguard, while Android phones officially can't do it (even if it ends up being one of the first three apps every new Android owner ends up downloading and installing, along with the task killer and tethering apps).
If anything, Apple victories over HTC could almost be a good thing, by forcing Google to tweak Android's API to make it trivially easy for end users to re-implement and replace whatever Apple makes them take out to avoid being sued for infringement. Part of the problem people attempting to build independent Android distros for current Android phones have is the fact that the core OS might be open source, but most of the apps needed to make an actual, functioning phone are not... in particular, the one that could be generally described as "the phone app". AFAIK, nobody has rolled a completely functional "phone" app for Android from scratch yet. Ditto, for the "camera" app. It'll happen someday, but hasn't really happened YET. If Google were forced to rip important features from shipping Android devices, they'd have no choice but to focus on distributing open-source reference apps that could be used by independent developers as the basis for full-blown "phone" apps that, by any objective definition, might *egregiously* infringe upon Apple's patents. Regardless, Apple would have about as much success getting those independent, open-source apps banished from the earth as Microsoft would have trying to take Samba or FAT32 away from Linux users.
> 1 - uhmm, but you can buy them just fine - they just weren't promoted at all by carriers, that's all.
They weren't "promoted" by AT&T and/or T-Mobile because they couldn't do data faster than 19.2kbps on either company's network, and no sane individual is going to spend several hundred dollars for an unsubsidized "smartphone" that takes 30 seconds just to handshake with a SMTP server or negotiate a https CONNECT.
Maybe they abandoned America, maybe they were kicked out. To Nokia, abandoning a tiny, foreign GSM market the size of Belgium or Portugal probably seemed like a good idea at the time. For whatever reason, Nokia has become utterly and completely irrelevant here. And like it or not, it IS hurting them, because America has lots of cultural influence. If Nokia and Symbian are completely off the radar in America, articles written by Americans are either going to ignore them completely, or casually brush them off as ancient relics of a dying platform. And people in other countries who read those articles are gradually going to come to the same conclusion, because the only phones they're ever going to read about in Wired, on Gizmodo, and other places are going to be phones running Android, Windows Mobile, OS X, and Palm. At least, until Nokia gets serious about selling phones in a market that might be small in terms of units sold, but is exponentially more influential than its raw size would otherwise imply.
> What are you talking about? The first EDGE phone in the world, Nokia 6200 > (launched 2002), had also AT&T as its launch carrier.
OK, let me rephrase that. None of their high-end PDA phones, starting sometime around 2005, seemed to support EDGE or AT&T's UMTS frequencies. I was told point blank by a group of Nokia evangelists right around the time their first internet tablet came out that none of their flagship phones available at that point could do anything besides GPRS in America. Some casual googling suggests it might have been due to a lawsuit between Nokia and Qualcomm that Nokia lost. I'm semi-guessing that it had something to do with either supporting EDGE and UMTS on the same chip, or maybe the ability to use UMTS when available, but fall back to EDGE automatically. In any case, they vanished from America almost overnight, so completely and thoroughly that more than a few Americans actually think they went out of business.
>> several years ago (when mobiles really started becoming more than voice + sms) >> it refused excessive castration of its phones,
Er, actually, it was more because none of Nokia's phones could do EDGE, none of Nokia's phones could do 3G UMTS on AT&T's 850/1900 uplink/downlink frequencies, and T-Mobile had no 3G UMTS network at all until about 18 months ago. As a result, Nokia's higher-end phones were useless GPRS paperweights in America. Ditto, for Canada (Rogers uses the same frequencies as AT&T). EDGE isn't FAST, but GPRS is so painfully slow, it's a borderline human-rights violation (basically, the difference between 9600 baud dialup and 128k ISDN).
> I'd say the recent swine flu scam pretty much put paid to your arguments... why not > pump millions of vulnerable folks full of toxic crap that can't be sold any other way?
Demand for it might have fallen though the floor once it became obvious that there wasn't going to be a large-scale pandemic with people dropping dead everywhere, but in the US at least, back around September, they could have charged $250-500 per shot and had lines around the corner. If Big Pharma were totally in charge, the first few million doses wouldn't have been sold for a near-pittance to government agencies for administration to healthcare workers and the like... they would have been sold at rent-seeking prices to the highest bidders first, and made it down the food chain to people without the means or willingness to spend that kind of money only after the most profitable customers had been satisfied, first. Of course, without large-scale purchases by governments, Big Pharma wouldn't have gambled on trying to rush hundreds of millions of doses that might have proved unfit to sell or unpopular... it would have limited its risk-exposure by producing a few tens of million doses, and if shit hit the fan, would have sold them to the highest bidders.
You can't have it both ways. They aren't going to produce hundreds of millions of doses of a product with a short shelf life, long production cycle, and demand that's almost impossible to predict at its start, unless there are firm orders waiting to be fulfilled regardless of what happens. It's easy to look back now and say it was a waste of money for a product that was only partly effective for its intended purpose, but had it ended up being a real, deadly pandemic, the same people screaming now about wasted funds would have been screaming about inadequate availability. Last spring, when a pandemic appeared possible, it would have been politically suicidal for ANY elected official to oppose spending money to reserve a share of the vaccine then under production.
> I don't know about that. To 2015 EE graduates, this Serial to IDC Header Slot Plate Adapter [buy.com] > might look like something dug out from an iron age excavation site,
I seriously doubt it, if only because the class of 2015's EE graduates are currently in high school, almost without exception into electronics and robots, and have all been dealing with serial ports since middle school. Now, change the target demographic to 2015 business school graduates (most of whom probably use their phones more than they use their computers, and very, VERY few of whom are likely to count "embedded electronics and robots" as hobbies), and you might have a point. If you really want to split hairs, I'd venture a guess that most of the 2015 EE grads vaguely remember when Windows 95 was new (even if they didn't grasp its significance until 5-10 years later). Remember, these are EE grads we're talking about... kids who've almost universally lived and breathed electronics and computers since basically middle school, if not earlier.
I had the same problem last summer -- a fungal outer-ear infection that drove me nuts for literally MONTHS, at one point leaving me half-deaf in the affected ear (really... I couldn't hear my phone well enough to use that ear, and couldn't understand conversations coming from that side when sitting at a table). I started with ear drops that were basically a steroid plus one of the antibiotics found in Neosporin (neomycin?). They did nothing at all. Well, that's not true... they did help the horrific itching a bit, but the ear infection got worse. A week later, I was on Ciprofloxacin + the same steroid. Yep, it got worse. My doctor thought I had cotton in my ear, and flushed the ear out. Instantly, my hearing problems went away... but started coming back again a week later, and 3 weeks later I was right back where I started.
I finally got an appointment with a real ear-nose-throat doctor. He took one look, sighed, and informed me that I was yet another patient given antibiotics + steroids for a fungal infection. He flushed it out (instant relief), gave me a prescription for what was basically vinegar ear drops, and another prescription for clotrimazole drops (with a disclaimer that their use for inner ear infections is strictly off-label, but likely to clear it up a LOT faster).
Getting back to the article's topic, it's not the antibiotics in the drops that made my fungal ear infection worse -- it was the steroids (they cause tissue damage), and the fact that I was basically soaking my ear canal with liquids that did nothing to impair fungi, and kept it nice and moist for their reproductive comfort & convenience. My ENT doctor expressed regret that nobody makes ear drops that combine an antibiotic, antifungal, and lidocaine (let's call it "Lotrisporicaine"), mainly because it would give general physicians something better to blindly prescribe for ear infections that actually WOULD work against pretty much anything a normal person is likely to get, without making it worse if it ended up being fungal instead of bacterial. His view was that most family doctors can't reliably tell the difference between bacterial and fungal ear infections, and most really bad fungal infections end up having a bacterial secondary infection anyway by the time the patient ends up seeing a specialist if he hasn't already been treated with antibiotic drops (because by that point, the patient has probably rubbed the ear canal's paper-thin skin raw with Q-tips in a desperate quest to stop the itching).
^^^ Amen. For anyone into embedded electronics (including robots), real honest-to-god non-USB-bridged serial ports are pretty much the only port left on a modern PC (or at least a decent thirdparty motherboard in the form of an IDC header) that neither Windows nor Java can fuck up.
> I prefer to pay for the EPG data, so I don't have to look up times, and I get recommendations, season passes etc.
I think part of the confusion here is due to TiVo's different policies in the UK and America. A UK TiVo (purchased ~4-5 years ago) can be used without a monthly subscription to pause live TV, and I think it can be used like a regular VCR. HOWEVER, that's ONLY because TiVo decided to abandon the UK market & discontinue their subscription service there, and would have been sued or prosecuted had they done otherwise.
An American TiVo without a subscription (with the POSSIBLE exception of the oldest of old first-generation boxen) is a doorstop.
> I don't know of any provider that gives "bring your own phone" discounts,
T-Mobile started doing it fairly recently. If you don't buy a subsidized phone, and you sign a contract, you can get their 'plus' plans, which are identical to the non-plus plans except they're cheaper. But AFAIK, Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T don't offer any discounts.
I had the same argument with a British coworker last year. He was convinced that Bush was going to somehow unleash "battle-hardened" troops on the American public and make himself America's dictator instead of heading home to Texas on Obama's inauguration day. After I finished laughing, I informed him that scenario was about as likely to happen as Prince Charles having his sons and mom murdered so he could be king before he died... then proceeded to explain why both scenarios were completely ridiculous.
Among other things, if one blindly assumes that every person classified by Wikipedia as an active-duty member of the US Armed Forces is a soldier capable of urban warfare, and that every single one is available for instantaneous deployment -- without support services -- across the US, there are *almost* enough to send 25 soldiers to every zipcode. Pit them against a population that values freedom, celebrates gun ownership, and generally practices large-scale civil disobedience even in normal daily life (speed limits, sales tax on out-of-state purchases, drug usage, underage drinking, you name it), and even if you assume the government has somehow managed to secure 100% complete blind obedience from its soldiers, they'd be hopelessly-outgunned and overpowered before they managed to park the Humvee and turn on the megaphone. God *himself* couldn't successfully impose martial law on an uncooperative American public;-)
> This is essentially the same problem that desktop linux has.
You mean desktop PCs are routinely sold with protected BIOSes that need to be hacked in order to install a different build of Linux or version of Windows? Built from 99.999% proprietary hardware devoid of public documentation, with drivers compiled straight into the kernel, or hacked onto a hypothetical build of Windows that works only on that specific PC? With loads of crapware you don't want cluttering the most prominent locations on your KDE/Gnome/Start menu, but you can't delete, because you have to be root/admin to do it, and the company that sold your PC to you won't let you have the root/admin password because they cut a deal with your ISP to give them 5% of the gross value-added revenue they'll charge you for running them?
OK, we came dangerously close to it before dodging the "Trusted Computing" bullet (for now, at least), but the fact is, desktop Linux and Android do NOT have the "exact same problem". A desktop Linux (or Windows) user might not WANT to upgrade to a newer version, but the opportunity is still there for the taking, and is never further away than "apt get", "./configure.pl, make, make test, make install", or Windows Update. In contrast, someone who has a 3-5 month old phone sold with Android 1.5 can't do jack shit to run commercial apps that require 2.0 (released literally 3-5 weeks after those same 1.5-crippled Android phones hit the stores), thanks to Android's back-assward copy protection mechanism that depends upon security by obscurity and keeping the user from having root/admin access to his own phone to maintain its illusion of value to developers.
Even if you root the phone and reflash it with unofficial 2.x firmware, you won't be allowed to run anything non-free from Android Market (including apps you already bought and paid for), because commercial software from Android Market won't allow itself to run on a phone with unsigned or "development" kernel. As of last weekend, at least, every 2.x kernel I'm aware of for the Sprint Hero is still classified by Android Market as 'development'. Yes, you can crack the apps you bought and run them anyway, but then the update mechanism will be broken, you won't be able to buy (or even view) new apps, and it really, really sucks to have to crack apps you PAID FOR in order to actually RUN them.
> I have owned several Android devices and I haven't had significant compatibility problems. > Some software takes a little while to get updated to the latest version of Android, but that's pretty much it.
The problem isn't inability to run old apps on new phones... it's the current inability of a substantial plurality of Android phones that aren't even SIX MONTHS OLD to run more and more apps that come out daily. Google is totally focused on forward compatibility, and has complete disregard for any semblance of backwards compatibility.
Disregard for backwards compatibility is tolerable, if not "OK", in the desktop Linux world, because you can upgrade your distro daily to the latest bleeding-edge code if you want to. In contrast, the overwhelming majority of Android phone owners don't have that freedom. The bootloaders are locked, the hardware is treated like a trade secret, and the few brave souls who manage to root and reflash without their carrier, manufacturer, and Google's blessing are exiled from the commercial software universe and aren't allowed to run apps they purchased & paid for since their ROM is unsigned, unblessed, and regarded as tainted by Google's AppStore.
Don't even get me started on the fact that Google didn't even release the API, let alone the source, to 2.1 until AFTER the Nexus One hit the streets. God forbid, some brave souls might have gotten it to "sort of" work on their unblessed, rooted phones a week before the N1 arrived. Ditto, for 2.0 and the Droid.
IMHO, Google's day of harsh reckoning is going to arrive in a couple of months with Android 2.5 and the CDMA "Nexus Two". If Google tries to release the CDMA Nexus Two with Android 2.5 and give Verizon a month of 2.5-exclusivity before releasing it (let alone the source) as an upgrade for the GSM Nexus One, Google WILL regret it when everyone who bought an Android phone over the past year hits their next upgrade anniversary and bails.
Up to now, they've been able to deflect most of the blame for being evil on the handset makers and carriers. If they turn around and do the same thing to THEIR customers (after reminding everyone over and over that they bought GOOGLE Nexus One phones, and are GOOGLE's customers), their credibility and goodwill will be shot to hell, and CNN's lead story will be the mob of angry Nexus One owners protesting in the GooglePlex parking lot.
Here's the REAL problem with Android right now: over the past 9 months or so, Android has advanced from 1.5 to 1.6, 2.0.x, and 2.1. Each of those advances added lots of desirable new capabilities. The problem is, roughly half the Android owners in North America were sold brand new phones last fall that came with Android 1.5... months after 1.6 was mainstream, barely a month before 2.0.x arrived with the Droid, and less than 3 months before 2.1 arrived in January. Of course, we've (almost) all been promised 2.1... sometime in the first half of 2010.
Speaking on behalf of Sprint Hero owners, we didn't even get positive confirmation that it was shipping with 1.5 instead of 1.6 until literally a few days before they arrived at Best Buy, and even then it was taken for granted by pretty much everyone that we'd have 1.6 on our phones by Thanksgiving. Of course, at that point, 2.0.x and the Droid were barely even credible rumors, especially given the fact that 1.6 was only a few months old at the time, and the way Google, Motorola & Verizon managed to keep 2.0 practically a state secret until the day before the Droid hit stores. I'll freely admit I was absolutely *livid* when I found out the Nexus One (with 2.1) was coming out less than 2 weeks after Christmas, before my own 1.5-crippled phone had its 3-month anniversary. And even now, HTC is still being coy about when we're going to finally get to have 2.1, besides vaguely repeating that it'll be sometime before July 1.
This really, really sucks. Seriously. Imagine you'd just gone out and spent a thousand bucks on a brand new laptop running Windows 3.1 a couple of months after Windows 95 hit the streets. You wanted Win95 too, but your ISP only allowed you to use that specific laptop sold with Windows 3.1... and it was widely understood by everyone (besides your ISP and the laptop's maker) that you could upgrade to Win95 on your own, anyway. Except after buying it, you discovered that the manufacturer locked it down to prevent you from booting from a Win95 installation disc. Then, after you finally managed to hack around that limitation, you discovered that none of its hardware drivers would work under Win95... not even in Win32s compatibility mode. But wait, it gets better...
A month later, amidst rumors that didn't become confirmed until literally days before release, a new, incompatible laptop with Windows 2000 came out... and your own laptop's manufacturer released a press release saying, "Good news! Since it's already obsolete, we're skipping Windows 95, and going straight to Windows 2000! You'll get to have it NEXT YEAR." A month later, yet another new laptop, equally-incompatible, with a substantially faster CPU, more ram, a much larger hard drive, and better display came out running XP... and the same day, Microsoft announced XP's arrival on MSDN. Oh, your laptop's maker sent out another press release... forget Win2k, it's going to be XP instead. At least they didn't push back the release date yet again, but in the meantime you're still hobbling along with Windows 3.1. Half the software that comes out can't be installed at all, and half the software that CAN crashes the moment you try launching it, because you're still running an ancient version of Windows.
Google & the Android team made things worse than they had to be by designing the new APIs as a core part of the OS, instead of a user-installable upgrade. If the gestures library and Bluetooth API were installable under 1.5 as shared libraries, instead of locked away in the kernel (which can't be easily upgraded without at least the non-interference, if not the actual cooperation, of the manufacturer), the distinction between 1.5 and 2.0 would *almost* be academic. The best any of us can do right now is to install a hacked-up 1.5 kernel that's had some band-aids to sort of run 2.0 apps, but it's kind of like the programs that came out around 1995 that tried to make Windows 3.11 look more like Windows 95... or the programs that stripped down Windows 98's Explorer to use Windows 95's l
> such as "what IP address you are logging in from", before you enter your code.
The problem is that a signficantly-nonzero percentage of users are forced to use proxies where the IP address can (and does) change from request to request (and remember, a single web page can generate dozens or hundreds of individual http requests -- one for each image, referenced.css file, embedded object, Javascript, etc). AOL and my employer's proxy server have done it for years, and it's only going to get worse with the arrival of IPv6 and 6to4 proxy schemes.
At best, the closest assumption that MIGHT be reasonable is that sequential requests made by a given user will PROBABLY fall within the same/24 subnet (ie, if the IP address is w.x.y.z, all of the requests will have the same values for w, x, and y), will almost certainly fall within the same/16 subnet (w and x will be constant), and it's almost inconceivable that they wouldn't fall within the same/8 subnet (w is constant). If you somehow had a reliable way of knowing the size of their ISP's subnet, you could probably make the scheme useful... but the fact is, when it comes to the largest ISPs, they THEMSELVES rarely have an exact inventory of their subnets available to most individuals within their organizations.
Tokens solve some problems, but create brand new ones. Take loss -- if users report a token stolen, they're going to probably end up paying for a new one and/or be without access to funds in the meantime. As a result, they won't report it lost if it might merely be misplaced. In the meantime, any transaction using it is largely presumed to be legitimate.
The compromise of sending notifications to the user's phone is a decent one, but it falls on its face in America due to the warped billing structure that persists to this day for incoming text messages. Not for iPhone users, or the majority of us Slashdot users who've had high end PDA phones (with high end data plans) for years, but for people like our parents... people who make 5-10 times as much money as we do, but bend over backwards to disable incoming text messages so they won't ever have to risk paying a galling (to them) additional $1.70-2.30/month in surcharges for the dozen or two text messages that would otherwise slip by and get them charged 10c apiece. The whole "moral principle" objection, where they might hemorrhage hundreds of dollars per month in subscription fees they're largely powerless to control for various services, and therefore fight like ancient Greek warriors to avoid those few additional surcharges they CAN take comfort & solace in avoiding.
> NiMH doesn't really have a memory effect. That's NiCad you're thinking of.
Sort of... if you egregiously abuse a NiMH battery by repeatedly recharging it when it's not even halfway discharged, it will eventually start to ACT like a NiCd battery with memory damage. The difference is, unlike NiCd, you can undo almost all of the damage by discharging it to the point where the phone shuts down, fully charging it back up, and repeating a few more times. With NiCd, memory effect is more or less irreversible and permanent.
> As soon as the N900 rings the 'phone app takes over the whole screen and all I have to do is press answer.
If that's the case, N900 owners need to evangelize it a bit more. To be honest, they're prett^h^h^h^h^h exceptionally rare (and quite expensive) in the US, so 99.999% of us have to depend upon what we've read about it. To be honest, most of the poor N900 reviews I've read up to this point (including from a few former N900 owners in this article alone) could have been written by someone complaining about why they hate their Windows Mobile phone (as in, almost search-with-replace identical), and most of the rebuttals by happy N900 owners have seemed like they were rationalizing its phone-related deficiencies against its spectacular capabilities as a pocket-sized laptop.
You're actually the first person I've ever seen who actually challenged the perception that it's not great as an actual phone, and illustrated specifically why it's false. Assuming that's the case, it's important to keep getting the word out. Lots of first-generation Android phone owners will be approaching their two-year anniversaries and be looking around for their next phones in another year or so. If the N900's dualcore gigahertz+ 854x480 descendant can manage to solidly do everything Android can without any drawbacks (ideally, with Dalvik ported to it so it can also run most Android apps), Nokia will be in an excellent position to earn back the US market share they lost almost entirely after 2004.
From what I recall, that was around the time they quit making CDMA phones (losing Sprint, Verizon, and roughly 65% of the US phone market in the process), and before they started to support 850MHz UMTS (a 1900/2100-only UMTS phone is a useless GPRS paperweight in the US). In fact, I remember going to a Nokia booth at Dadeland Mall around 2005 or 2006 when they were on tour showing off their new internet tablet and their cutting-edge phones. Let's just say the Nokia evangelists working there were visibly frustrated about having to admit for the N-thousandth time that basically none of the phones they had on display could actually do anything better than GPRS in the United States (I don't think their first UMTS phones were even capable of doing EDGE).
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> PS: "another" point of failure to cope with, for me, would be to lug a netbook AND
> a phone AND depend on a cable or Bluetooth to connect the two.
Tsk. If you had an iPhone, you wouldn't tether, because that's simply Not Allowed. When you defile an iPhone by jailbreaking and tethering it, it makes Steve Jobs sad.
> The BigPharma are already trying (and succeeding) in getting patents for stuff that we ALL already possess,
> and seek to make a profit from those patents.
Er, we all possess blood, and people give it up for free. Nevertheless, there are thousands of patents related to its collection, screening, processing, storage, and injection. "Big Pharma" isn't robbing the human race by "patenting stem cells", the companies are patenting the commercial processing of stem cells, and the equipment and chemicals used to do it. If your doctor wants to collect your stem cells and inject them elsewhere in your body, there's not a thing any IP lawyer can do to stop him... but they most certainly CAN do their best to prevent him from buying medical equipment (say, China) that infringes on one or more American patents.
Contrary to popular misconception, the FDA has NO role in the enforcement of IP law. If you seek approval for a drug protected by one or more patents, the FDA will go right ahead and process the application just like any other. If it's equivalent to a brand-name drug and you've documented everything properly, they'll approve it without so much as a grunt. The FDA doesn't HAVE to care about IP law, because they know that long before you sell your first tablet to a pharmacy, the patented drug's owners will have an injunction against you if they think there's the slightest chance their lawyers might be able to convince a judge (and possibly a jury) that your drug infringes against their patent.
> If you're stuck on a carrier with CDMA, you have to.
Correction: "If you're stuck with an AMERICAN carrier (who uses CDMA), you have to.
CDMA has a perfectly good feature called R-UIM, which is literally a superset of a GSM SIM card (you can use one in a GSM phone AS a SIM card, but you can't use a GSM SIM card as a R-UIM). The problem is that Sprint and Verizon are both assholes and refuse to let us have phones that use them. If you Google "+HTC +Apache +RUIM", you can read all about how the HTC Apache (sold as the PPC-6700 by Sprint and the xv6700 by Verizon) had the vestigial remains of a R-UIM card (missing only the bracket), and how users outside the US were able to buy American phones for a pittance, solder in their own R-UIM card sockets, and use them in India (I believe it also worked in New Zealand, South Korea, and possibly China).
The fact is, all four of America's major cell phone networks are assholes that go out of their way to MAKE their phones as mutually-incompatible as they possibly can. Obviously a CDMA phone isn't going to work with T-Mobile or AT&T, and a GSM/UMTS phone isn't going to work with Sprint or Verizon, but in America you can't even use a Verizon CDMA phone on Sprint, or an AT&T iPhone on T-Mobile -- locked, unlocked, or otherwise. Sprint won't let you use a CDMA phone whose ESN isn't already in their holy database. Verizon doesn't support R-UIM cards, and won't give out the provisioning info you'd need to make an arbitrary imported CDMA phone work properly with Verizon's voicemail or EV-DO data service (Sprint won't either, but their ESN-filtering means you won't even get far enough for it to matter anyway). AT&T and T-Mobile are technically GSM, but neither company will sell phones capable of UMTS on the other's network (unlocked or otherwise), and both go out of their way to make it as difficult and painful as possible to use their phones in a foreign country with SIM locks. Mark my words, when AT&T loses iPhone exclusivity, Apple is going to have two different GSM iPhones -- one that does 850/1900/2100 (so T-Mobile/US customers won't be able to use it), and one that does 1700/1900/2100 (so AT&T customers won't be able to use it).
Actually, that's not *quite* the whole story. What REALLY happened was the federal government pressured banks to make loans to "under-represented" groups who didn't meet normal lending criteria, then got Fannie Mae to insure those loans. The thing is, the banks eventually realized that the federal government's MOTIVE was encouraging loans to "under-represented" borrowers, but they weren't necessarily LIMITED to taking advantage of the relaxed underwriting criteria for members of those groups. They also learned how to package risky loans and sell them off quickly. Ultimately, they metaphorically said "Fuck it" and allowed ANYONE to qualify for a loan under those terms. Including (most importantly) people buying grossly overpriced investment properties.
The overwhelming majority of mortgage defaults (in Florida, at least) aren't from homeowners who over-extended themselves (even though there are quite a few)... they're from borrowers who bought overpriced condos expecting to flip them for twice the purchase price, then ended up having to actually close on them to avoid forfeiting their deposits (not realizing the worst was yet to come). The deal-killer ended up being the fact that most of those condos ended up costing more to own than they could conceivably earn from rental income. When the market completely tanked, to the point where those condos ended up losing more value than the down-payment itself, were a monthly drain of several hundred dollars (even WITH a tenant), and the investor-owner ended up finding himself or herself strapped for cash, THOSE were the mortgages that got walked away from en-masse. The default rate for owner-occupied homes is much, much lower because even if your house is totally "underwater" (worth less than the balance on the mortgage), one way or another you need somewhere to live... and if you weren't making mortgage payments, you'd probably be paying almost as much in rent. So, the incentive to walk away from the mortgage is much, much lower.
Plus, as a practical matter, unless some drastic external factor is involved (forced relocation, divorce, etc), most people won't default on their mortgage until they've already defaulted on all their unsecured debt. At least, if they have more than three functioning brain cells and understand the difference between secured and unsecured debt. As a practical matter, even people who grossly over-extended themselves buying a house can handle their payments once they declare bankruptcy, and no longer have to spend hundreds of dollars per month on credit card payments. Of course, any mortgage payments they make during the 6 months before bankruptcy get forcibly retracted by the court... but banks deal with this scenario all the time, and know that when it happens (especially in a property market like we have now), they're better off just re-aging the account and leaving well enough alone as long as the homeowner keeps the payments current going forward (because someone who was a risky borrower when they had lots of debt is actually a fairly low risk once all that debt gets washed away).
You know, reading this story completely made my morning a lot happier. In America, the idea that cats are treated horribly in China (if not eaten, as well) is almost a meme, despite the fact that cats are generally loved and treated quite well elsewhere in China's neighborhood (Taiwan, Japan, etc). Reading about Chinese public outrage over a cat's horrific death is absolutely heartwarming.
Fun fact: the Chinese character for 'cat' is written as the radical for 'animal' (literally, 'beast with claws') next to the phonetic for "sounds like mao1" (basically, "Meow" after you inflect it) -- http://www.ehow.com/video_4403804_write-cat-chinese-symbols.html
> Do you REALLY think that more than 1 in 100,000 "users" could accomplish the tasks listed above?
Well, ok, actually that's a bad example, because it's not really the way you'd do it on an Android phone anyway. If you were the developer, you'd have it tethered via USB and use adb (directly or indirectly) to shove the newly-built .apk file from your desktop PC to your phone. If you were a regular user, you'd either grab it for free from Android Market, or just download the .apk file with your phone's browser and install it from there (if Apple's stormtroopers were guarding Android Market with a team of attack lawyers). I took a few liberties describing the process so it would make more sense to people with a background in Java, but not Android.
The point is that Apple can stop big companies from selling technology deemed to be infringing, but all they can do is swat & take potshots at individuals selling apps that for a buck apiece in Android Market that do the same thing, and they can't do a thing to stop people from writing infringing programs and anonymously giving them away for free, because nobody can stop any Android user from exercising his or her holy right to install whatever he or she wants to install. The ultimate "nuclear option" that has traditionally kept companies 'honest' was the power of courts to deem millions of dollars worth of inventory unsaleable.
> Of course it's aimed at Google, Google will be the death of the iPhone.
I seriously doubt it, anymore than Apple or Linux have been the death of Windows. There's always going to be a market for an attractive, polished phone that "just works" and makes nontechnical users with lots of money happy. I personally see Android evolving towards two different market segments: dirt-cheap phones that are nice, but not as polished or powerful as Apple's best iPhone (for the unwashed masses), and high-end Android phones embraced by users who really want pocket-sized laptops... the same people who end up running regedit within 5 minutes of booting a newly-installed copy of Windows for the first time, or run Linux on their desktop PC. I'm convinced Microsoft is going to eventually buy Blackberry & migrate it to Windows Phone, or find a way to otherwise hijack and take over that market segment.
I don't see Apple's total market share ever really exceeding 10% or so, because their phones' most compelling features (besides "apple coolness") will inevitably end up running on Android phones (with or without anyone's blessing) as fast as they show up on Apple's own phones. By the same token, I think Microsoft's going to have a seriously uphill battle to win the hearts and wallets of anyone not shackled to an Enterprise Management Initiative(tm)... especially after yesterday's idiotic announcement that they're going to completely fuck and alienate one of their few remaining groups of loyal, hardcore supporters -- the people who paid lots of money for a Touch HD2, only to be slapped and told they can't have Windows Phone 7 because their phones have 5 hardkeys instead of Microsoft's mandated 3.
Well, even if Apple prevails, most of Apple's patents cover things implemented via software. If push came to shove, Android's API could be refined to simply omit them, with clear entry points where users (who could care less about infringement) can download their own thirdparty extensions to do the same thing and install them anyway. For example, Google could (in fact, should) implement keyguard as a Java interface, then at startup read a config file to instantiate an instance of an object that implements that interface to use as its handler. The handler provided by HTC might unlock the phone if the user slides open the keyboard, or presses & holds the 'send' hardkey while pressing and releasing the 'end' hardkey. If the user wants a graphical alternative that works like the iPhone (or Eclair on the Droid, or whatever), he simply copies the relevant jarfile to his phone, and edits the config file so that at startup, it instantiates a KeyguardFactory object from the jarfile, then uses it to create an IKeyguardHandler-implementing object that gets registered with the OS. Of course, there's no reason why the actual end user would have to interact directly with the jarfile, the config file, or anything else... THAT part could all be automated by the .apk & its manifest. The point is, if HTC and everyone else had to remove their keyguard apps from Android, you can bet that within a week, there would be several dozen free apps floating around that did it anyway.
At the end of the day, patent law only works as a real deterrent against people who need to sell tangible goods with an infringing component. If the infringing item costs nothing to make or distribute, Apple's lawyers could spend the rest of their lives playing whack-a-mole sending DMCA takedown notices to everyone and their brother who posts a copy of a keyguard app for Android somewhere, and it won't meaningfully stop anyone. Now, it WOULD give Apple a marketing advantage over Android, because then they could argue that an iPhone comes out of the box with keyguard, while Android phones officially can't do it (even if it ends up being one of the first three apps every new Android owner ends up downloading and installing, along with the task killer and tethering apps).
If anything, Apple victories over HTC could almost be a good thing, by forcing Google to tweak Android's API to make it trivially easy for end users to re-implement and replace whatever Apple makes them take out to avoid being sued for infringement. Part of the problem people attempting to build independent Android distros for current Android phones have is the fact that the core OS might be open source, but most of the apps needed to make an actual, functioning phone are not... in particular, the one that could be generally described as "the phone app". AFAIK, nobody has rolled a completely functional "phone" app for Android from scratch yet. Ditto, for the "camera" app. It'll happen someday, but hasn't really happened YET. If Google were forced to rip important features from shipping Android devices, they'd have no choice but to focus on distributing open-source reference apps that could be used by independent developers as the basis for full-blown "phone" apps that, by any objective definition, might *egregiously* infringe upon Apple's patents. Regardless, Apple would have about as much success getting those independent, open-source apps banished from the earth as Microsoft would have trying to take Samba or FAT32 away from Linux users.
> 1 - uhmm, but you can buy them just fine - they just weren't promoted at all by carriers, that's all.
They weren't "promoted" by AT&T and/or T-Mobile because they couldn't do data faster than 19.2kbps on either company's network, and no sane individual is going to spend several hundred dollars for an unsubsidized "smartphone" that takes 30 seconds just to handshake with a SMTP server or negotiate a https CONNECT.
Maybe they abandoned America, maybe they were kicked out. To Nokia, abandoning a tiny, foreign GSM market the size of Belgium or Portugal probably seemed like a good idea at the time. For whatever reason, Nokia has become utterly and completely irrelevant here. And like it or not, it IS hurting them, because America has lots of cultural influence. If Nokia and Symbian are completely off the radar in America, articles written by Americans are either going to ignore them completely, or casually brush them off as ancient relics of a dying platform. And people in other countries who read those articles are gradually going to come to the same conclusion, because the only phones they're ever going to read about in Wired, on Gizmodo, and other places are going to be phones running Android, Windows Mobile, OS X, and Palm. At least, until Nokia gets serious about selling phones in a market that might be small in terms of units sold, but is exponentially more influential than its raw size would otherwise imply.
> What are you talking about? The first EDGE phone in the world, Nokia 6200
> (launched 2002), had also AT&T as its launch carrier.
OK, let me rephrase that. None of their high-end PDA phones, starting sometime around 2005, seemed to support EDGE or AT&T's UMTS frequencies. I was told point blank by a group of Nokia evangelists right around the time their first internet tablet came out that none of their flagship phones available at that point could do anything besides GPRS in America. Some casual googling suggests it might have been due to a lawsuit between Nokia and Qualcomm that Nokia lost. I'm semi-guessing that it had something to do with either supporting EDGE and UMTS on the same chip, or maybe the ability to use UMTS when available, but fall back to EDGE automatically. In any case, they vanished from America almost overnight, so completely and thoroughly that more than a few Americans actually think they went out of business.
>> several years ago (when mobiles really started becoming more than voice + sms)
>> it refused excessive castration of its phones,
Er, actually, it was more because none of Nokia's phones could do EDGE, none of Nokia's phones could do 3G UMTS on AT&T's 850/1900 uplink/downlink frequencies, and T-Mobile had no 3G UMTS network at all until about 18 months ago. As a result, Nokia's higher-end phones were useless GPRS paperweights in America. Ditto, for Canada (Rogers uses the same frequencies as AT&T). EDGE isn't FAST, but GPRS is so painfully slow, it's a borderline human-rights violation (basically, the difference between 9600 baud dialup and 128k ISDN).
> I'd say the recent swine flu scam pretty much put paid to your arguments... why not
> pump millions of vulnerable folks full of toxic crap that can't be sold any other way?
Demand for it might have fallen though the floor once it became obvious that there wasn't going to be a large-scale pandemic with people dropping dead everywhere, but in the US at least, back around September, they could have charged $250-500 per shot and had lines around the corner. If Big Pharma were totally in charge, the first few million doses wouldn't have been sold for a near-pittance to government agencies for administration to healthcare workers and the like... they would have been sold at rent-seeking prices to the highest bidders first, and made it down the food chain to people without the means or willingness to spend that kind of money only after the most profitable customers had been satisfied, first. Of course, without large-scale purchases by governments, Big Pharma wouldn't have gambled on trying to rush hundreds of millions of doses that might have proved unfit to sell or unpopular... it would have limited its risk-exposure by producing a few tens of million doses, and if shit hit the fan, would have sold them to the highest bidders.
You can't have it both ways. They aren't going to produce hundreds of millions of doses of a product with a short shelf life, long production cycle, and demand that's almost impossible to predict at its start, unless there are firm orders waiting to be fulfilled regardless of what happens. It's easy to look back now and say it was a waste of money for a product that was only partly effective for its intended purpose, but had it ended up being a real, deadly pandemic, the same people screaming now about wasted funds would have been screaming about inadequate availability. Last spring, when a pandemic appeared possible, it would have been politically suicidal for ANY elected official to oppose spending money to reserve a share of the vaccine then under production.
> I don't know about that. To 2015 EE graduates, this Serial to IDC Header Slot Plate Adapter [buy.com]
> might look like something dug out from an iron age excavation site,
I seriously doubt it, if only because the class of 2015's EE graduates are currently in high school, almost without exception into electronics and robots, and have all been dealing with serial ports since middle school. Now, change the target demographic to 2015 business school graduates (most of whom probably use their phones more than they use their computers, and very, VERY few of whom are likely to count "embedded electronics and robots" as hobbies), and you might have a point. If you really want to split hairs, I'd venture a guess that most of the 2015 EE grads vaguely remember when Windows 95 was new (even if they didn't grasp its significance until 5-10 years later). Remember, these are EE grads we're talking about... kids who've almost universally lived and breathed electronics and computers since basically middle school, if not earlier.
I had the same problem last summer -- a fungal outer-ear infection that drove me nuts for literally MONTHS, at one point leaving me half-deaf in the affected ear (really... I couldn't hear my phone well enough to use that ear, and couldn't understand conversations coming from that side when sitting at a table). I started with ear drops that were basically a steroid plus one of the antibiotics found in Neosporin (neomycin?). They did nothing at all. Well, that's not true... they did help the horrific itching a bit, but the ear infection got worse. A week later, I was on Ciprofloxacin + the same steroid. Yep, it got worse. My doctor thought I had cotton in my ear, and flushed the ear out. Instantly, my hearing problems went away... but started coming back again a week later, and 3 weeks later I was right back where I started.
I finally got an appointment with a real ear-nose-throat doctor. He took one look, sighed, and informed me that I was yet another patient given antibiotics + steroids for a fungal infection. He flushed it out (instant relief), gave me a prescription for what was basically vinegar ear drops, and another prescription for clotrimazole drops (with a disclaimer that their use for inner ear infections is strictly off-label, but likely to clear it up a LOT faster).
Getting back to the article's topic, it's not the antibiotics in the drops that made my fungal ear infection worse -- it was the steroids (they cause tissue damage), and the fact that I was basically soaking my ear canal with liquids that did nothing to impair fungi, and kept it nice and moist for their reproductive comfort & convenience. My ENT doctor expressed regret that nobody makes ear drops that combine an antibiotic, antifungal, and lidocaine (let's call it "Lotrisporicaine"), mainly because it would give general physicians something better to blindly prescribe for ear infections that actually WOULD work against pretty much anything a normal person is likely to get, without making it worse if it ended up being fungal instead of bacterial. His view was that most family doctors can't reliably tell the difference between bacterial and fungal ear infections, and most really bad fungal infections end up having a bacterial secondary infection anyway by the time the patient ends up seeing a specialist if he hasn't already been treated with antibiotic drops (because by that point, the patient has probably rubbed the ear canal's paper-thin skin raw with Q-tips in a desperate quest to stop the itching).
^^^ Amen. For anyone into embedded electronics (including robots), real honest-to-god non-USB-bridged serial ports are pretty much the only port left on a modern PC (or at least a decent thirdparty motherboard in the form of an IDC header) that neither Windows nor Java can fuck up.
> You can do exactly that.
> I prefer to pay for the EPG data, so I don't have to look up times, and I get recommendations, season passes etc.
I think part of the confusion here is due to TiVo's different policies in the UK and America. A UK TiVo (purchased ~4-5 years ago) can be used without a monthly subscription to pause live TV, and I think it can be used like a regular VCR. HOWEVER, that's ONLY because TiVo decided to abandon the UK market & discontinue their subscription service there, and would have been sued or prosecuted had they done otherwise.
An American TiVo without a subscription (with the POSSIBLE exception of the oldest of old first-generation boxen) is a doorstop.
> I don't know of any provider that gives "bring your own phone" discounts,
T-Mobile started doing it fairly recently. If you don't buy a subsidized phone, and you sign a contract, you can get their 'plus' plans, which are identical to the non-plus plans except they're cheaper. But AFAIK, Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T don't offer any discounts.
I had the same argument with a British coworker last year. He was convinced that Bush was going to somehow unleash "battle-hardened" troops on the American public and make himself America's dictator instead of heading home to Texas on Obama's inauguration day. After I finished laughing, I informed him that scenario was about as likely to happen as Prince Charles having his sons and mom murdered so he could be king before he died... then proceeded to explain why both scenarios were completely ridiculous.
Among other things, if one blindly assumes that every person classified by Wikipedia as an active-duty member of the US Armed Forces is a soldier capable of urban warfare, and that every single one is available for instantaneous deployment -- without support services -- across the US, there are *almost* enough to send 25 soldiers to every zipcode. Pit them against a population that values freedom, celebrates gun ownership, and generally practices large-scale civil disobedience even in normal daily life (speed limits, sales tax on out-of-state purchases, drug usage, underage drinking, you name it), and even if you assume the government has somehow managed to secure 100% complete blind obedience from its soldiers, they'd be hopelessly-outgunned and overpowered before they managed to park the Humvee and turn on the megaphone. God *himself* couldn't successfully impose martial law on an uncooperative American public ;-)
> This is essentially the same problem that desktop linux has.
You mean desktop PCs are routinely sold with protected BIOSes that need to be hacked in order to install a different build of Linux or version of Windows? Built from 99.999% proprietary hardware devoid of public documentation, with drivers compiled straight into the kernel, or hacked onto a hypothetical build of Windows that works only on that specific PC? With loads of crapware you don't want cluttering the most prominent locations on your KDE/Gnome/Start menu, but you can't delete, because you have to be root/admin to do it, and the company that sold your PC to you won't let you have the root/admin password because they cut a deal with your ISP to give them 5% of the gross value-added revenue they'll charge you for running them?
OK, we came dangerously close to it before dodging the "Trusted Computing" bullet (for now, at least), but the fact is, desktop Linux and Android do NOT have the "exact same problem". A desktop Linux (or Windows) user might not WANT to upgrade to a newer version, but the opportunity is still there for the taking, and is never further away than "apt get", "./configure.pl, make, make test, make install", or Windows Update. In contrast, someone who has a 3-5 month old phone sold with Android 1.5 can't do jack shit to run commercial apps that require 2.0 (released literally 3-5 weeks after those same 1.5-crippled Android phones hit the stores), thanks to Android's back-assward copy protection mechanism that depends upon security by obscurity and keeping the user from having root/admin access to his own phone to maintain its illusion of value to developers.
Even if you root the phone and reflash it with unofficial 2.x firmware, you won't be allowed to run anything non-free from Android Market (including apps you already bought and paid for), because commercial software from Android Market won't allow itself to run on a phone with unsigned or "development" kernel. As of last weekend, at least, every 2.x kernel I'm aware of for the Sprint Hero is still classified by Android Market as 'development'. Yes, you can crack the apps you bought and run them anyway, but then the update mechanism will be broken, you won't be able to buy (or even view) new apps, and it really, really sucks to have to crack apps you PAID FOR in order to actually RUN them.
> I have owned several Android devices and I haven't had significant compatibility problems.
> Some software takes a little while to get updated to the latest version of Android, but that's pretty much it.
The problem isn't inability to run old apps on new phones... it's the current inability of a substantial plurality of Android phones that aren't even SIX MONTHS OLD to run more and more apps that come out daily. Google is totally focused on forward compatibility, and has complete disregard for any semblance of backwards compatibility.
Disregard for backwards compatibility is tolerable, if not "OK", in the desktop Linux world, because you can upgrade your distro daily to the latest bleeding-edge code if you want to. In contrast, the overwhelming majority of Android phone owners don't have that freedom. The bootloaders are locked, the hardware is treated like a trade secret, and the few brave souls who manage to root and reflash without their carrier, manufacturer, and Google's blessing are exiled from the commercial software universe and aren't allowed to run apps they purchased & paid for since their ROM is unsigned, unblessed, and regarded as tainted by Google's AppStore.
Don't even get me started on the fact that Google didn't even release the API, let alone the source, to 2.1 until AFTER the Nexus One hit the streets. God forbid, some brave souls might have gotten it to "sort of" work on their unblessed, rooted phones a week before the N1 arrived. Ditto, for 2.0 and the Droid.
IMHO, Google's day of harsh reckoning is going to arrive in a couple of months with Android 2.5 and the CDMA "Nexus Two". If Google tries to release the CDMA Nexus Two with Android 2.5 and give Verizon a month of 2.5-exclusivity before releasing it (let alone the source) as an upgrade for the GSM Nexus One, Google WILL regret it when everyone who bought an Android phone over the past year hits their next upgrade anniversary and bails.
Up to now, they've been able to deflect most of the blame for being evil on the handset makers and carriers. If they turn around and do the same thing to THEIR customers (after reminding everyone over and over that they bought GOOGLE Nexus One phones, and are GOOGLE's customers), their credibility and goodwill will be shot to hell, and CNN's lead story will be the mob of angry Nexus One owners protesting in the GooglePlex parking lot.
> Exactly. I don't know what the problem with all this is -- just code for the 1.5 API right now.
Unless, of course, you want to write a program that does anything with Bluetooth besides toggle it on and off...
Here's the REAL problem with Android right now: over the past 9 months or so, Android has advanced from 1.5 to 1.6, 2.0.x, and 2.1. Each of those advances added lots of desirable new capabilities. The problem is, roughly half the Android owners in North America were sold brand new phones last fall that came with Android 1.5... months after 1.6 was mainstream, barely a month before 2.0.x arrived with the Droid, and less than 3 months before 2.1 arrived in January. Of course, we've (almost) all been promised 2.1... sometime in the first half of 2010.
Speaking on behalf of Sprint Hero owners, we didn't even get positive confirmation that it was shipping with 1.5 instead of 1.6 until literally a few days before they arrived at Best Buy, and even then it was taken for granted by pretty much everyone that we'd have 1.6 on our phones by Thanksgiving. Of course, at that point, 2.0.x and the Droid were barely even credible rumors, especially given the fact that 1.6 was only a few months old at the time, and the way Google, Motorola & Verizon managed to keep 2.0 practically a state secret until the day before the Droid hit stores. I'll freely admit I was absolutely *livid* when I found out the Nexus One (with 2.1) was coming out less than 2 weeks after Christmas, before my own 1.5-crippled phone had its 3-month anniversary. And even now, HTC is still being coy about when we're going to finally get to have 2.1, besides vaguely repeating that it'll be sometime before July 1.
This really, really sucks. Seriously. Imagine you'd just gone out and spent a thousand bucks on a brand new laptop running Windows 3.1 a couple of months after Windows 95 hit the streets. You wanted Win95 too, but your ISP only allowed you to use that specific laptop sold with Windows 3.1... and it was widely understood by everyone (besides your ISP and the laptop's maker) that you could upgrade to Win95 on your own, anyway. Except after buying it, you discovered that the manufacturer locked it down to prevent you from booting from a Win95 installation disc. Then, after you finally managed to hack around that limitation, you discovered that none of its hardware drivers would work under Win95... not even in Win32s compatibility mode. But wait, it gets better...
A month later, amidst rumors that didn't become confirmed until literally days before release, a new, incompatible laptop with Windows 2000 came out... and your own laptop's manufacturer released a press release saying, "Good news! Since it's already obsolete, we're skipping Windows 95, and going straight to Windows 2000! You'll get to have it NEXT YEAR." A month later, yet another new laptop, equally-incompatible, with a substantially faster CPU, more ram, a much larger hard drive, and better display came out running XP... and the same day, Microsoft announced XP's arrival on MSDN. Oh, your laptop's maker sent out another press release... forget Win2k, it's going to be XP instead. At least they didn't push back the release date yet again, but in the meantime you're still hobbling along with Windows 3.1. Half the software that comes out can't be installed at all, and half the software that CAN crashes the moment you try launching it, because you're still running an ancient version of Windows.
Google & the Android team made things worse than they had to be by designing the new APIs as a core part of the OS, instead of a user-installable upgrade. If the gestures library and Bluetooth API were installable under 1.5 as shared libraries, instead of locked away in the kernel (which can't be easily upgraded without at least the non-interference, if not the actual cooperation, of the manufacturer), the distinction between 1.5 and 2.0 would *almost* be academic. The best any of us can do right now is to install a hacked-up 1.5 kernel that's had some band-aids to sort of run 2.0 apps, but it's kind of like the programs that came out around 1995 that tried to make Windows 3.11 look more like Windows 95... or the programs that stripped down Windows 98's Explorer to use Windows 95's l
> such as "what IP address you are logging in from", before you enter your code.
The problem is that a signficantly-nonzero percentage of users are forced to use proxies where the IP address can (and does) change from request to request (and remember, a single web page can generate dozens or hundreds of individual http requests -- one for each image, referenced .css file, embedded object, Javascript, etc). AOL and my employer's proxy server have done it for years, and it's only going to get worse with the arrival of IPv6 and 6to4 proxy schemes.
At best, the closest assumption that MIGHT be reasonable is that sequential requests made by a given user will PROBABLY fall within the same /24 subnet (ie, if the IP address is w.x.y.z, all of the requests will have the same values for w, x, and y), will almost certainly fall within the same /16 subnet (w and x will be constant), and it's almost inconceivable that they wouldn't fall within the same /8 subnet (w is constant). If you somehow had a reliable way of knowing the size of their ISP's subnet, you could probably make the scheme useful... but the fact is, when it comes to the largest ISPs, they THEMSELVES rarely have an exact inventory of their subnets available to most individuals within their organizations.
Tokens solve some problems, but create brand new ones. Take loss -- if users report a token stolen, they're going to probably end up paying for a new one and/or be without access to funds in the meantime. As a result, they won't report it lost if it might merely be misplaced. In the meantime, any transaction using it is largely presumed to be legitimate.
The compromise of sending notifications to the user's phone is a decent one, but it falls on its face in America due to the warped billing structure that persists to this day for incoming text messages. Not for iPhone users, or the majority of us Slashdot users who've had high end PDA phones (with high end data plans) for years, but for people like our parents... people who make 5-10 times as much money as we do, but bend over backwards to disable incoming text messages so they won't ever have to risk paying a galling (to them) additional $1.70-2.30/month in surcharges for the dozen or two text messages that would otherwise slip by and get them charged 10c apiece. The whole "moral principle" objection, where they might hemorrhage hundreds of dollars per month in subscription fees they're largely powerless to control for various services, and therefore fight like ancient Greek warriors to avoid those few additional surcharges they CAN take comfort & solace in avoiding.
> NiMH doesn't really have a memory effect. That's NiCad you're thinking of.
Sort of... if you egregiously abuse a NiMH battery by repeatedly recharging it when it's not even halfway discharged, it will eventually start to ACT like a NiCd battery with memory damage. The difference is, unlike NiCd, you can undo almost all of the damage by discharging it to the point where the phone shuts down, fully charging it back up, and repeating a few more times. With NiCd, memory effect is more or less irreversible and permanent.
> As soon as the N900 rings the 'phone app takes over the whole screen and all I have to do is press answer.
If that's the case, N900 owners need to evangelize it a bit more. To be honest, they're prett^h^h^h^h^h exceptionally rare (and quite expensive) in the US, so 99.999% of us have to depend upon what we've read about it. To be honest, most of the poor N900 reviews I've read up to this point (including from a few former N900 owners in this article alone) could have been written by someone complaining about why they hate their Windows Mobile phone (as in, almost search-with-replace identical), and most of the rebuttals by happy N900 owners have seemed like they were rationalizing its phone-related deficiencies against its spectacular capabilities as a pocket-sized laptop.
You're actually the first person I've ever seen who actually challenged the perception that it's not great as an actual phone, and illustrated specifically why it's false. Assuming that's the case, it's important to keep getting the word out. Lots of first-generation Android phone owners will be approaching their two-year anniversaries and be looking around for their next phones in another year or so. If the N900's dualcore gigahertz+ 854x480 descendant can manage to solidly do everything Android can without any drawbacks (ideally, with Dalvik ported to it so it can also run most Android apps), Nokia will be in an excellent position to earn back the US market share they lost almost entirely after 2004.
From what I recall, that was around the time they quit making CDMA phones (losing Sprint, Verizon, and roughly 65% of the US phone market in the process), and before they started to support 850MHz UMTS (a 1900/2100-only UMTS phone is a useless GPRS paperweight in the US). In fact, I remember going to a Nokia booth at Dadeland Mall around 2005 or 2006 when they were on tour showing off their new internet tablet and their cutting-edge phones. Let's just say the Nokia evangelists working there were visibly frustrated about having to admit for the N-thousandth time that basically none of the phones they had on display could actually do anything better than GPRS in the United States (I don't think their first UMTS phones were even capable of doing EDGE).